AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[John Nerbonne]

I haven't been too active in this community for 4-5 years, but the conference
popularity issue bothered me a lot when I chaired the HPSG committee
(1996-98), when I argued unsuccessfully for broader conferences.  So
I'll chime in.  If you don't know me, please be assured that I write with
sympathy for the general issue.  I'll be a big negative about some habits
in presentation and in choice of issues.

What's wrong with the following picture?

  We're getting mails with the heading on how to increase interest in HPSG
  (among linguists), and the mails themselves concern topics such as
  the intuitionist interpretation of the logics underlying the special
  formalism in which linguistic descriptions, including abstract (theoretical)
  descriptions, are about.

I submit that there simply is no LARGE community of linguists interested in
this.  There  is a small, very capable community organized as MOL (Mathematics
of Language), and maybe HPSG work primarily aimed at the mathematical
foundations of grammar should team up with them.  I've attended two of their
meetings, and the attendees are both good and receptive.  Formal grammar is
also good.  But also small in numbers.

If you don't know me, and feel tempted to launch into an ad hominem about
scientific precision, please take a look at my web site.  I agree about the
need for scientific precision.  But I think HPSG focuses so much on
metaissues of formalism, interpretation and mathematical foundations
that the average working linguist tunes out.   And I think that the community
looks too slavishly to the GB community for its notions of what interesting
syntactic issues are.

My suggestions for keeping up GENERAL linguistic interest, on the other hand:

1. Encourage a level of presentation that non-HPSGers can follow, at least
roughly.  It is standard in (some) other exact sciences to provide
presentation at intuitively accessible levels and to keep nitty-gritty
details separate.  Normally people do not expect audiences for talks to grasp
six to ten new, interlocking equations (or descriptions, in the HPSG case) in
dozens of variables and constants, and understand it precisely.    You leave
the nuts and bolts to appendices in the papers.   The presentation
should normally constrast analyses proposed with others (those of rivals!),
again, at an intuitively clear level.  I mean here not only oral
presentations, but also papers, where I'd suggest that we encourage a
style in which analyses are explained at an intuitive level, and where
technical details are kep separate.

Frankly, I suspect that HPSG papers will become more palatable to many
others, if the advice above were followed.  I also suspect that the many
people interested in syntax, but not in the mathematical foundations of
syntactic theory, would also tune in -- people whose primary interest is
psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language contact, comparative
syntax, formal semantics, etc.  I added some remarks on this to a recent
review I did of Ginzburg and Sag (see my web page).

2. It would also help if the HPSG field focused less on standard GB
fare, i.e. binding theory (where HPSG & GB are quite similar), control,
long-distance dependency, etc. (I do not exempt myself from this criticism).
Naturally one needs to be able to handle these things, but the
Chomskyan query "Where are the new facts?"  is also quite reasonable
to all of us as scientists.  Over the years I've seen any number of HPSG
analyses fail to make the impact I thought they deserved in spite of genuine
innovation---perspectives that wouldn't translate simply into binary trees
with simple deformations, places therefore where alternative perspectives
might have a chance of being profoundly different.

    - Malouf's work on gerunds and cross-categorization
    - Kathol's work on combinatorics vs. surface constituency (following
    on Dowty and Reape)
    - Hinrichs and Nakazawa's work on argument raising (as an
    alternative to standard controlled VP analyses)
    - Miller's (Godard, Sag, Monachesi, ..) et al. work on clitics
    - the work on German fronting that I was involved in, and that
     was improved by Mueller, Meurers and de Kuthy
    - the work on adjuncts by Bouma, Sag and Malouf

I realize that the GB field is a moving target, but they repeatedly stick to
very simple trees as the only analytical device where HPSG offers a
lot more (maybe too much, but maybe that's a separate issue).  If HPSG
cannot provide inisightful, radically innovative perspectives on core GB
issues, or, alternatively, insightful analyses on other interesting syntactic
issues, something is wrong.

3. We need to lose the bitter, and sometimes arrogant edge on the polemics.
GB/Minimalism simply is the dominant view and--like it or not--it is more than
reasonable for a young syntactician to aim to make her mark there, and to
regard most of the alternatives as things to get to later.  Alternatives have
to prove their worth, dominant theories don't.   And isn't this what most
young HPSGers do vis-a-vis the even less popular frameworks, say Diver
functionalism, or word grammar?  You can't get to all of it.

    Maybe the case of formal semanticists is the most revealing.  This
    group is NOT technically ill-educated, but a large number of semanticists
    chooses to embed their work in GB syntax, simply to be taken seriously
    by a broad range of potentially interested people.

John
--
John Nerbonne, Information Science              +31 50 363 58 15
P.O.Box 716, University of Groningen        FAX +31 50 363 68 55
NL 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands	www.let.rug.nl/~nerbonne